How to Format Hard Drive Using Command Prompt (Tutorial)

Formatting a drive is the same as if you buy a new hard drive since the process erases all the data in one fell swoop. With this method, you can clean internal as well as external storage media. In this tutorial, I will explain steps to format a hard drive using command prompt.

Steps to Format Hard Drive with Diskpart
Before proceeding further make sure you backup all available data so as to prevent data loss. Follow the below steps to format a drive:

Step 1. Open an elevated command prompt i.e. run as administrator as shown below.

Step 2. Once command line is open, type diskpart and press enter.

Step 3. The above command will open a Diskpart window. In this window, type list disk and press enter. It will list all the available drives.

Step 4. Now type select disk (disk number) as shown below. Specify the drive number which needs to be formatted.

Step 5. In this step, type clean. This command will permanent delete all files and folders and successfully clean up the disk.

Step 6. To make the drive again accessible, type create partition primary.

Step 7. Now format the drive with FAT or NTFS file system. Type format fs=ntfs and press enter.

Step 8. To assign a drive letter, you can type assign as shown below.